‘Paper Mice’ is a poetry comic by Paul K. Tunis, published in Ink Brick issue 2. Made up visually of coloured panels and several drawings alongside fragments of text, the work in many ways resembles a traditional comics grid. However, the images, panels and text do not conform to a standard comics layout, with the drawings spreading across panels, and the panels themselves spreading over the two pages, while the text seems to follow the more standard order of being read down the left hand page and then the right. This challenges our idea of how the work should be read, giving the impression that the various elements are in flux, and might possibly relate to one another in ways beside those presented by conventional sequential reading.

This effect is continued in the relationship between the text of the poem and the images, where there is a sense of some correlation between the two, but it is difficult to define clearly. The image of the egg hatching and the duckling in the bottom-right seem to immediately correspond with what seems to be the first line of the poem, in the top-left: ’I found something small’. However, the further description of the thing found does not match the image of the hatching egg, and instead, reading the poem alongside the images, we begin to feel that we are being presented with two parallel ideas, related but distinct, through the combination of images and text. 

The work asks the reader to consider what the relationship between these elements could be; what, if any, whole can be made from them? As I read the work, I found the line ‘I stacked grief on his workbench’ particularly illuminating, as it prompted me to consider the whole work as a reflection on the process of creating art from grief. In my reading of the poem-comic, the grotesque, uncomfortable language of the text and the more hopeful imagery combine here to reflect the emotional and artistic complexity of such a process. The image on the second page of the face in profile, resting on a hammer, feels as though it acts as kind of hinge between these two sides, the face seems thoughtful and at peace, and yet the hammer carries an element of threat, especially when paired with the other two dominant images, the delicate-looking egg and the defenceless duckling. The hammer itself is a tool for potential destruction and violence, or for building something new. What the subject of the drawing is considering doing with the hammer is unclear; perhaps they are deciding between these two uses. The poem-comic as a whole communicates a sense of navigating a difficult emotional and artistic terrain, balancing the destructive and the creative.